Workers' Party of Vietnam

The Workers' Party of Vietnam (WPV), also known as the Lao Dong, was a communist political party in North Vietnam which existed from 1951 to 1976. The WPV was formed after the Indochinese Communist Party split into regional parties in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and it was led by Ho Chi Minh (it had 766,349 members at the time of the split). The Viet Minh was officially dissolved in 1951 and replaced by a new front, the Lien Viet, under the WPV's leadership. Following the end of the First Indochina War in 1955, the WPV became the ruling party of North Vietnam. At its Third Party Congress in 1960, it committed itself to the liberation of South Vietnam, and it came to have 500,000 members in both the north and south. In 1976, a year after the Fall of Saigon, the WPV and the People's Revolutionary Party merged to form the Communist Party of Vietnam.